


The best there is at what they do

by rainbowagnes



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Wolverine (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Cassian is wolverine, Chirrut is basically professor x, FN-2187 makes an appearance, Gen, Jyn is jean, Mutants au, North American politics, as does RA-23, def a super powerful telekinetic WMD, marvel AU, post relationship, sort of, yo this a logan au and that means it will be sad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 06:44:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10611405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: Jyn Erso accepts a mission, even though it's going to drag her into the cause she thought she'd left behind. The year is 2029, mutants are dying out, and a cargo driver has unearthed a secret that will be either their survival or their damnation.Cassian Andor is dying, poisoned by decades of adamantium. But he's gonna have to hold himself together if he wants to save both a Alzheimer's stricken telepath and an eleven year old girl with bone claws and a painfully similar past.The obligatory Logan AU, because I don't know which movie fucked us all up more.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Real talk- the only person I'd be OK with being Logan aside from Dafne Keen is Diego Luna.
> 
> I had to re-mix the plot of Logan a bit to fit everyone in. I promise most of the Iconic scenes are still in it. 
> 
> As usual, every comment is appreciated!

Mexico City, 2029

She recognized her contact immediately. He looked out of place in uniform khakis, and island of clean cut working-class restraint surrounded by technicolored depravity and pounding rock music. She doesn't quite fit in here, gringa skin and nearly ever inch of her body covered in the anonymous dark clothing she needs to do her job. But him? He's just asking to be noticed.

And by some one a lot worse than her. 

She tries to sidle up next to him silently. "Mezcal." The bartender slides toward a cheap tourist bottle, but she slides a thousand peso note out of her sports bra and slams it on the table. "None of the tourist crap with the worm in the bottle. Good stuff. I can pay." Her Spanish is fast, fluent, and with a strong South American accent. The bartender is confused, but he picks up a bottle from higher up the shelf and sloshes it into a glass for her. "And don't water it down." 

The contact isn't drinking anything.

"Order something." She drops her voice, trying to attract his attention in English under her breath. "Now." 

"I don't drink." 

"Then order a fucking horchata, I don't care. Just don't stand around like an idiot." 

Contact orders himself a virgin drink, stuttering and blushing when the bartender winks back at him in return.

"Are you . . ." He stutters some more. Jyn knocks back the mezcal, immediately enjoying the way it fuzzes up her senses. Just to what she imagines ordinary people feeling, so she doesn't notice the thousand things her senses assault her with, day in and day out. The cage fighter in the corner is a former mutant, a class D who took the suppressants and moved on. His family never knew. The woman next to her, knocking back shot after shot of cheap tequila is a week past a back alley abortion. Her family never knew either. The manager is cheating on his wife with Julio next door, Consuelo the waitress is worrying over an Economics exam tomorrow morning, Rodrigo has gotten involved in an illegal cock fighting ring to pay for his daughter Graciela to go to private school. She knows all of their worries, fears, and secrets, and she's never even looked them in the eyes. 

It's exhausting. It's a tide of humanity that threatens to drown her and smother her in its waves.

So she orders another round of drinks. 

She doesn't even try to read people's minds. It's just that their thoughts and emotions come straight to the top, clamoring for her attention. 

"Am I what?" 

"Are you Grey?" He asks her again, inhumanly large eyes pouring into her. He's not from around here either.

"Jane Grey. You got a problem with that?" 

"Of course not," he says, clearly lying. He was expecting a beefy man with a white van. She can see him try to wipe away the notion in his mind. "I just need your help."

"I'm not in the business of favors. How much?' 

"I don't have anything." 

"Then not interested." Harsh, but she needs to get to the point. There's no American Mutant Control, but Jyn has made too many enemies in the DF to want to stick around for long. 

"Please, Ms. Grey. Please. There are children's lives on the line." 

"There always is." Third round of mescal. 

"Mutants. They aren't a myth. They're real, and there's mutant children." 

"There haven't been any mutants born in twenty five years." As though she isn't intimately aware of that fact herself. "Every one living ended up sterilized, and there haven't been any more born. They're dying out. Nature correcting an abomination."

"Please, listen to me. I've seen them." 

This perks her interest enough to pin a point in a mescal fog. "Seen them?" The contact isn't lying.

"I work for the Alkali Transigen corporation as a cargo driver, taking stuff to the labs in the city. It's a decent job, pays well. I need it to pay for my mother's hosp-" 

"You've seen mutant kids?" He's smart enough that his eyes probably weren't deceiving him, and if that's the case . . . 

"I deliver things. Lab supplies mostly, but also supplies and the what not. Food and all that. I noticed things in the supplies that where different, out of place for a lab. Child-sized clothes, pediatric medication, school books. Weird for a biotech lab, right?" 

"Right." Oh god. No.

"So one night, I go in there after my shift when the place is closed up and see what's in the lab proper. And it's kids. Weird kids- one of them was bright blue, and one of them kept levitating things and another just kept flaming up like she was on fire- but kids. Kids, being grown in a lab like mice or vats of bacteria. Almost like real people, you know?" 

"I know." She sets down her glass and takes a singular step into the contact's mind, and it hits her like a punch. The memory of cold floors, beating hearts, anti-septic fluid. Alcohol. And an endless row of kids kept in cages, marked with number, trying to laugh and play through the metal bars that divided them. 

It's a memory that triggers her own, forcing her back into the layers of the past she's spent years trying to repress. She was a soldier, not an experimental subject, but that didn't mean she wasn't confined and cloistered during most of her childhood. She still spent significant portions of her teenage years in a lab, being scanned, analyzed, tested, and put on file by the people who where supposed to be her allies, who in the end decided she had too much power in her cells for any one person, as though she hadn't known that for herself.

But as long as mutants exist, they'll be scientific curiosities, points of interest in an expanding evolutionary tree. Never human. Something less, because they are something more. 

Maybe it's better that soon enough, they won't exist. 

It was her first thought after, at fifteen, the doctor had given her a referendum. Thank god. 

"Ms. Grey, the lab started importing large amounts of sodium pentobarbital. They're euthanizing the kids." There's an intense kind of sorrow to the man's voice, a pitch-black guilt. "They're killing them." 

Fuck. "So what do you want me to do?"

"Get the kids across the US border to Canada. They've offered immunity and resettlement to all mutants, and they should be safe there." 

Should. There was no being safe, really, not when people feared your very DNA, when you were so dangerous you where always in danger of people who wanted to use you as a weapon. When you were born so dangerous, such an abomination of nature, that you were dangerous even to yourself. 

"No such thing as safe for those kids." 

"But there is such a thing as safer, Ms. Grey, and you can take them there." 

"Can't. It's in America. I don't do America." 

"Why? It's safe, and it's two days driving to cross it."

"Not safe for everyone. It'd take a miracle to get across it." The US Government's had her DNA on file since she was thirteen. All it would take was one mandatory DNA check and they'd be made. From a rental car company, from a hotel concierge, a bank teller, a bored meter maid. They'd started installing those around Mexico City as well in the affluent areas, a safetly feature that didn't do much to keep anyone safe, but luckily they still didn't mean much in the scummy underworld that was her home. 

"I hear you're in the business of miracles, Miss Grey. That's why I found you. Some one calls you up with an impossible job, some impossible thing that needs stealing or job that needs doing or person that needs killing, and you do it, and no one knows how. You hide things anyone should see, you make things explode, you made things fly. You change the fabric of reality if people pay you enough." He looks flustered from the monologue and goes back to sipping a fruity drink. 

She can't do that, but she can do almost anything else, on the atomic level. And she does, for a price. Mainly demo work, but stealing things as well, rearranging her particles to walk through walls, knocking out guards with a thought and melting the cobalt walls of safes with the touch of a hand. She deals with cash, sometimes gold and gems or information. Never people. 

"I'm a living weapon. I'm too dangerous for those kids." 

"Respectfully, Miss Grey, you're the only thing those kids got. I don't have any kind of powers. I'm a truck driver. Saving mutant kids from the megaconglomerate that wants to kill them is a little above my pay grade." 

"No one else is brave enough to do it." 

"How many are still alive?" 

"One cell block. I've been successful at getting maybe thirty or forty kids out in the morning deliveries, and there's others before me. They go to someplace in North Dakota, to stay with a man called Rictor." 

Rictor. She recognizes the name. An underclassmen who could shift the earth, before Westchester. Powerful, but nothing compared to her.

"So what do you need me to do?" 

"They're euthanizing the most powerful kids last. I guess the lab's still waiting for corporate to pull the plug on the research." 

The man pulled out his phone and showed her a picture. "This one's FN-2187. He's the leader of the ones that remain. Don't know exactly what kind of abilities he has, but definitely tough. I'm not sure when I can get them out of the lab, but he knows about it and he's getting the others ready to leave." 

Jyn looked at the kid. Fourteen or fifteen maybe, with dark eyes that seemed to interrogate her even through the phone screen.

"You sure he's strong enough?" 

"He's gotta be, for what's ahead of him. So you up for it?" 

"Yeah. What's the details?" 

"Stay ready for the next couple days. Be ready. When I call, we meet up at the set coordinates and drive like hell to Canada." 

"And I do?" 

"The impossible. The miracles that have given you a name, Ms. Grey. You hide the kids from border patrol. You protect them when Terrigen comes." 

"They'll come? How much are some lab subjects worth?" 

"You don't know Terrigen." 

"How many kids is it gonna be?" She's become the scum she swore she'd never be, even if it's in service of an entirely different cause. 

"Four. 87 and his block. Should be able to use a regular car." 

"Not a problem. I'll meet you with one." She's going to have to finance this herself, she can see, but the last couple of jobs have provided with with the cash for that. One of the few upsides of her abilities is being able to recognize a pure heart when she sees one, and Contact's is one of them. He honestly just wants to save the kids. 

"One condition. We stay out of Juaruz and El Paso, cross the border somewhere else." She's agreeing to a lot, it's reasonable to stick in a single, intensely personal, intensely petty requirement.

"Why?"

"Let's say I have friends there I don't want to see again." Unprompted, her mind filters through a selection of the memories she'll never be allowed to forget. The flash of adamantium claws, the sweat of sparring sessions, the sweetness of a certain few nights. Westchester. 

They shake on the deal, and even though Jyn doesn't want it, the driver gives her his name. Bodhi Rook. Definetly not from around here. A good man. Too good a man. She knows what happens to men like that, and she swears to herself that the moment they get to Manitoba she's pushing him as far away from all this as she possibly can. Bodhi Rook is a good man, and that means he needs better than the fate of every good man she's ever known. 

She pulls another thousand note from the rubber-band wrapped roll in her boot and walks out into the smoggy night. 


End file.
